Offers the most comprehensive assessment of biographers' and historians' response to White in the final historiographical essay

Ellen Harmon White

American Prophet

Edited by Terrie Dopp Aamodt, Gary Land, and Ronald L. Numbers

Description

In America, as in Britain, the Victorian era enjoyed a long life, stretching from the 1830s to the 1910s. It marked the transition from a pre-modern to a modern way of life. Ellen Harmon White's life (1827-1915) spanned those years and then some, but the last three months of a single year, 1844, served as the pivot for everything else. When the Lord failed to return on October 22, as she and other followers of William Miller had predicted, White did not lose heart. Fired by a vision she experienced, White played the principal role in transforming a remnant minority of Millerites into the sturdy sect that soon came to be known as the Seventh-day Adventists. She and a small group of fellow believers emphasized a Saturday Sabbath and an imminent Advent. Today that flourishing denomination posts eighteen million adherents globally and one of the largest education, hospital, publishing, and missionary outreach programs in the world. Over the course of her life White generated 70,000 manuscript pages and letters, and produced 40 books that have enjoyed extremely wide circulation. She ranks as one of the most gifted and influential religious leaders in American history and this volume tells her story in a new and remarkably informative way. Some of the contributors identify with the Adventist tradition, some with other Christian denominations, and some with no religious tradition at all. Their essays call for White to be seen as a significant figure in American religious history and for her to be understood within the context of her times.

Ellen Harmon White

American Prophet

Edited by Terrie Dopp Aamodt, Gary Land, and Ronald L. Numbers

Author Information

Edited by Terrie Dopp Aamodt, Professor of history and English, Walla Walla University, Gary Land, Professor of history and political science, emeritus, Andrews University, and Ronald L. Numbers, Hilldale Professor Emeritus of the History of Science and Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Terrie Dopp Aamodt is Professor of History and English at Walla Walla University. Gary Land is a retired Professor of History and Political Science at Andrews University. Ronald L. Numbers is Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Medicine and of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Contributors:

Terrie Aamodt is professor of history and English at Walla Walla University. She studies the intersections between religious history and American culture, the topic of her book Righteous Armies, Holy Cause: Apocalyptic Imagery and the Civil War (2002).

Eric Anderson is president of Southwestern Adventist University in Keene, Texas. His books include Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872-1901: The Black Second (1981) and Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902-1930 (1999), co-authored with Alfred Moss of the University of Maryland.

Jonathan M. Butler authored Softly andTenderly Jesus is Calling: Heaven and Hell in American Revivalism, 1870-1920 (1991). Most of his scholarly publications, however, have focused on Millerism and Adventism, including a groundbreaking essay, "Adventism and the American Experience," in The Rise of Adventism (1974). He also co-edited (with Ronald Numbers) The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (1987).

Ronald Graybill formerly served as an associate director at the Ellen G. White Estate and then for several years as chair of the department of history at La Sierra University. He has written numerous journal articles as well as the volumes Ellen White and Church RaceRelations (1970) and Mission to Black America: The True Story of Edson White and the Riverboat Morning Star (1971).

Floyd Greenleaf is emeritus professor of history at Southern Adventist University. He is the author of The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Latin America and the Caribbean (1992), In Passion for the World: A History of Seventh-day Adventist Education (2005), and A Land of Hope: the Growth of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in South America (2011).

Fritz Guy is Research Professor of Philosophical Theology at La Sierra University, where he also served as president from 1990 to 1993. He has written or edited several books: Understanding Genesis: Contemporary Adventist Perspectives, co-edited with Brian Bull and Ervin Taylor (2006), Christianity and Homosexuality: Some Seventh-day Adventist Perspectives, co-edited with David Ferguson and David R. Larson (2008), and God, Sky and Land: Genesis 1 as the Ancient Hebrews Heard It, co-written with Brian Bull (2011).

Bert Haloviak retired in 2010 as director of the office of archives and statistics at the Adventist world headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. He has taught courses in Adventist history and the books of Daniel and Revelation at Washington Adventist University.

Gary Land retired in 2010 after forty years with the Andrews University Department of History and Political Science, serving as departmental chair from 1989 to 2010. He is the editor of Adventism in America: A History (1986), The World of Ellen G. White (1987), Everett N. Dick's William Miller and the Advent Crisis (1994), and Historical Dictionary of the Seventh-day Adventists (2005). He coauthored, with Calvin W. Edwards, Seeker After Light: A. F. Ballenger, Adventism, and American Christianity (2000).

Benjamin McArthur is professor of history at Southern Adventist University. He has authored two books, Actors and American Culture, 1880-1920 (1984) and The Man who was Rip Van Winkle: Joseph Jefferson andNineteenth-Century American Theatre (2007).

Paul McGraw is professor of history at Pacific Union College. He specializes in American religious history with a specific focus on Adventist history and the development of the designation "cult."

Jerry Moon is professor and chair of church history at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, Andrews University. His dissertation was was published as W. C. White and Ellen G. White: The Relationship Between the Prophet and Her Son (1993).

Douglas Morgan is professor of history and political studies at Washington Adventist University. He is the author of Adventism and theAmerican Republic: The Public Involvement of a Major Apocalyptic Movement (2001) and Lewis C. Sheafe: Apostle to Black America (2010).

Ronald L. Numbers is Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Medicine and of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has taught for the past four decades. He has written or edited more than thirty books, including Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (3rd ed., 2008), The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (expanded edition, 2008), and Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2008).

Arthur Nelson Patrick was an honorary senior research fellow at Avondale College of Higher Education in Australia and was director of the Ellen G. White/SDA Research Centre for the South Pacific Division of Seventh-day Adventists from 1976 to 1983.

Rennie B. Schoepflin is associate dean and professor of history in the College of Natural and Social Sciences, California State University, Los Angeles. His publications include Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America (2003) and numerous articles on the history of science and religion and on Adventist studies.

Graeme Sharrock holds graduate degrees from Andrews University and the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. His chapter in this volume condenses portions of an extensive research project on the development of Ellen White's "testimonies" for his forthcoming University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation.

Ann Taves is professor of religious studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and past president of the American Academy of Religion. Her most recent books include Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (2009) and Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (1999).

Laura Vance teaches sociology and is the director of the gender and women's studies program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. She is the author of several articles on the topic and of Seventh-day Adventism in Crisis: Gender and Sectarian Change in an Emerging Religion (1999).

Gilbert Valentine is chair and professor of educational leadership at La Sierra University. He has written several books on Adventist history, including W. W. Prescott: Forgotten Giant of Adventism's Second Generation; The Struggle for the Prophetic Heritage: Issues in the Conflict for Control of the Ellen G. White Publications 1930-1939 (2006); and 'The Prophet and the Presidents: Ellen G. White and the Processes of Change,1887-1913: a Study of Ellen Whites Influence on the Administrative Leadership of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (2011).

Grant Wacker is professor of Christian history at Duke University. He has co-edited or authored six books, including the award-winning Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (2001), and numerous articles in academic journals and popular magazines. Wacker is working on a cultural biography of the Protestant evangelist Billy Graham, titled Billy Graham and the Shaping of Modern America.

T. Joe Willey conducted research on the brain and taught neuroscience at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine. In 2009 his book A Beast in the Garden: Who were the Confused Races of Man Created by Amalgamation of Man and Beast was published. Now retired, he contributes articles to Adventist Today on Adventism in the nineteenth century.

Ellen Harmon White

American Prophet

Edited by Terrie Dopp Aamodt, Gary Land, and Ronald L. Numbers

Reviews and Awards

"An ingenious interconnected series of biographical studies, this collection effectively brings Ellen Harmon White, the seer of the Seventh-day Adventist tradition, into the thick of American religious and cultural history. As a collaborative venture, it is superbly orchestrated: it demonstrates Whites profound relevance to any number of historiographieson gender and race, on medicine and education, on visionary experience and practical theology, on missions and globalization." - Leigh Eric Schmidt, Washington University in St. Louis